


Other People's Heartache

by ourcrimescene



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M, Mojave Waste
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2015-11-20
Packaged: 2018-05-02 14:48:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5252240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ourcrimescene/pseuds/ourcrimescene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Mojave Waste takes no prisoners--sometimes surviving is all that is left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pt 1. Liv

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



Liv stopped smoking a few years ago after the taste of ashes in her mouth drove away a client. It was bad business, and besides, the black stains between her fingers had faded and her voice doesn’t sound so much like sandpaper despite the sand and dust of the Mojave Waste.

It’s unfortunate though—smoking gave herself something to think about between clients, or during clients. Making ends meet in New Vegas is endlessly tough, but she’s a pretty girls, and it’s safer in the city that it is out there—she flitted around smaller towns and the Boomers for awhile, but there’re too many whack-jobs out there. Blowing shit up or spending too much time alone gives them too many weird ideas. She’s gotta keep some dignity.

She stands outside the casinos in a couple scraps of fabric, forcing down any shivers from the cold and keeping a coy smile plastered on her face. Theo’s sick again, and she needs some extra cash to keep him properly fed and get him so medicine, and he can’t exactly fuck for money. Gavin isn’t home yet, otherwise she wouldn’t need to do this for a few weeks.

Ever since Gavin came into the picture, she hasn’t needed to fuck like this more than once or twice a month, but recently merc and courier work has gotten pretty unreliable for him, and he doesn’t verbally question where the extra money comes from. He knows, of course, but as long as they don’t talk about it, they can pretend it isn’t happening.

Nights like this are good—she can usually get four or five clients, or if she’s lucky, get a high roller. Her best clients are always the rich old men who like to pretend they’ve still got it. They pay well, overpay sometimes, get off fast, and generally don’t ask for too much gross shit. Maybe before Gavin, she would be willing to do some of the more adventurous shit, but he grinds his teeth enough as it is. She doesn’t like it when he makes that face.

Her attention snaps back to the streets when a bloke slows mid-stride in front of her, giving her a once-over. She bats her eyelashes prettily, but her eye contact with him is broken when a ghoul stops in front of her, a hand holding the lip of his cap purse open. Obviously he’s just won big, and he’s looking for a smooth-skin chick who’ll close her eyes and fuck.

He won’t be her first ghoul, though they aren’t as common as normal folk, and they’re pretty shy. She gives him an answering smile, reaching for his hand. She’s got a hotel room reserved for the night—though sucking men off in an alleyway avoids the cost of the room, she hates kneeling on the hard ground or getting cuts and scrapes on her back from rocks and shit. It fucking hurts.

She makes the appropriate noises and the right faces as the ghoul drives into her. She charges him extra just because she can. Ghouls are shy, more willing to just pay what she asks, no bartering or anything. He’s her third client of the night, and his money will be enough for her to get the medicine for Theo. Maybe some more RadAway to keep around. She’ll probably be able to get a Nuka-Cola for the boy.

The client hands her the money once he finishes and leaves in short order. No lingering for him. Not really surprising, ghouls are pretty ashamed of being attracted to smooth skins, one of the fetish stigmas. She doesn’t complain.

She calls it a night after that, not really having the energy for any others. On the walk home, she swings by the store to pick up Theo’s medicine, a Nuka-Cola, and a bag of chips for herself. Sometimes, she needs to treat herself.

Theo’s passed out on the couch when she gets home. The boy was a stray that Gavin brought home a little over a year ago, batting his pretty blue eyes at her, telling her that he couldn’t just leave him out in the Waste by himself. Not like Liv can say no to him, with everything that he does, and everything that she does.

The boy’s got some kind of genetic disorder though, getting sick a lot, and there isn’t a damn thing they can do about it other than keep him comfortable when he gets like this. Liv gently shakes him awake. Theo’s face light up at the sight of the Nuka-Cola she holds out to him, taking a sip of it with his medicine before lying back down.

Liv carefully counts the caps she got tonight, neatly stacking them before stowing them in their safe, which is pitifully almost empty, save for a sparse scattering of caps and her ring that she removes before going to work.

The day is heating very quickly as the sun rises, the air over the entire landscape refracting. The Mojave Waste is unforgiving, but there isn’t anything anywhere else for any of them.

She can hear Theo tossing and turning in the other room, trying to get comfortable. He’s been getting sicker every time he relapses, and it’s only a matter of time. She won’t be able to fuck that problem away.

She works again the next night. They need a safety net in their finances, and there’s no guarantee on when Gavin will get back from this job. She’s hired off the bat by a couple that just made big money in the casino and want to experiment. Couples are her favorite. She can mostly ignore the man for most of the time, and charge double for really only the same amount of time.

A courier that had a run-in with a deathclaw fucks like he’ll never live another day. He says that there’s a pack of them out in the Waste attacking people on the highway, and the Boomers are blowing up any sorry asshole that gets too close, as usual. There’s weird shit going on over by one of the vaults.

He keeps talking while he fucks her. Normally she’d make them shut up, but she needs to hear about what’s going on out there. Needs to know if Gavin is coming back.

The courier is ready to go again five minutes later. “It’ll cost you double.” She says in a clipped tone.

“Can I come on your face?” The boy asks.

Liv runs numbers in her head, keeping her face neutral. “Another fifteen.”

The courier grunts and shoves in. Liv examines him, barely keeping up the pretense of enjoying this. This one’s just a boy, a baby courier. If he let his beard grow, it’d still be patchy, and his skin is still soft, without the leathery texture of months in the harsh sun of the Waste.

He comes on her face. He’s trembling too bad to properly count caps—from the adrenaline of near death or probably the first fuck of his life—and overpays. She doesn’t correct him.

She calls it a night. She can’t handle another pathetic sob trying to pretend their life isn’t in shambles. Liv’s a realist—she knows her life is in shambles. Liv washes her face in the bathroom of the hotel, scrubbing until she doesn’t feel like her face is covered in another man’s—boy’s—semen.

She gets home just ahead of a dust storm, and Theo is still asleep with the half empty bottle of Nuka-Cola from yesterday. She seals all the windows and doors, pressing towels and clothes into cracks beneath the doors to keep the dust out, and rouses Theo for breakfast.

She feels shitty about it, and she’s sure she’s going to go to hell for it, but she never bonded with the boy like Gavin did. But, for him, Liv takes care of Theo like he were her own. If she were the sort that wanted her own. She does her best.

Theo quickly is asleep again, after downing the food she puts in front of him. She’s seen enough death in New Vegas to know that they’re reaching the end.

Liv sits down in front of the safe, taking the rolls of caps and meticulously organizing and rolling the new caps. If Gavin gets back soon, she won’t need to head to the Strip again, but that’s just wishful thinking, isn’t it Liv?

She doesn’t mean to fall asleep in front of the safe—though who couldn’t realistically expect that, with two consecutive almost-all-nighters—but she doesn’t rouse until she hears the loud thump of the safe closing.

Liv lurches upright, surrounded by the thin blankets and old pillows on their bed. She reaches under the bed for the gun Gavin leaves her when he goes trips and fumbles to load it, her fingers suddenly gone numb.

“Hey,” Gavin says, coming around the corner into the doorway, “Don’t shoot me, please.” He’s absolutely covered in dust, his normally mahogany-colored hair completely dulled, skin and clothes coated, and his light blue eyes are a sharp contrast to all the dull brown.

“Hey,” She says, letting out a breath of relief. He gently takes the gun from her hands, methodically unloading it.

“Hell of a storm out there.” He says, stepping away from her to take off his clothes without getting dust all over her.

“Is it over?” She asks, ruffling his hair to get some of the dirt out.

“Mostly, the worst of it passed a couple hours ago.” He looks her up and down, making sure she’s okay. “Must’ve been tired.”

“Theo’s sick again.” She says in answer. Gavin knows what she really means, understands that she does what she can. “It’s pretty bad,” She takes his hand, leading him to their bed. She kisses him, her fingers tracing his jaw—he’s gotten scruffy again, always does when he does long jobs like this.

“We’ll take care of it tomorrow,” He replies, running his fingers through her hair. His lips are dry, cracked from the dry heat and the inside of his mouth tastes faintly like rust. The taste of the Mojave.

He lies back against the pillows, hands resting on his stomach as she cuddles up next to him, regardless of the dust and dirt and sweat on him. There’s some new bruising on his shoulder, but he’s still got the same stupid freckles on his cheeks, stupid long eyelashes, and stupid chipped bottom tooth.

She doesn’t deserve him—she really doesn’t. She’d been selling her body for years on the Strip before she met him. At her prime, she could charge thousands of caps for a night of her company, but Gavin was never a client, never a former client, just a stupid courier left for dead on the Strip after looking some rich guy wrong. Couldn’t exactly watch someone die at her feet.

She saw him every time he passed through New Vegas after that, always offering her warm smiles so sweet they made her teeth hurt—she’d always liked sweets.

After she came out of a meeting with a client with a black eye, he’d quietly offered her a home. He had steady pay as a courier and was building a name and a reputation, and he could get her off the streets and out of other people’s hotel rooms. Standing there with a black eye and throbbing cheek, it wasn’t exactly an offer she could turn down. Not an offer she wanted to turn down.

He bought her a bag of chips and gave her a home. Everything else came after that. Love and all that shit. She gave everything she had left in her for a bag of chips.

She falls asleep with the wind from the dust storm whistling around the house and her fingers laced in Gavin’s.

Theo dies two days later.

Gavin takes another courier assignment within the day.


	2. Pt 2. Andross

He’s been wearing the same shirt for four days, and the shirt’s forgotten how to not be slightly damp from the perpetual nuclear summer in the Mojave. He broke down a couple days ago and tore a piece of non-descript and questionable piece of fabric from his other shit to tie around his forehead. Sweat kept dripping in his eyes, and the sand sticks to the moisture. Sand in the eyes is even worse than sweat in the eyes, and sand in the eyes is infinitely worse than wearing the shirt for four days.

There’s sweat behind his knees and in his elbows and the small of his back and everywhere in between. As the sun continues to rise in the sky, the temperature continues to climb. The Mojave is hot, but sometimes it’s really fucking hot. It’s an important distinction.

On days like this, he wonders if it’d be better if he stripped his hair and made it light blonde or keep the dark hair, or if wearing more clothes is better than less clothes. Couriers all like to tell others what’s best, but everyone’s got different opinions and it doesn’t seem like there’s much agreement.

He hasn’t shaved in more than a week, and his beard has reached the point in time where all it does is itch all day. There’s a week-old burn on his side that is also approaching the itching stage of healing, but at this point his shirt just keeps sticking to it and peeling it away is excruciatingly painful.

Some crazy fuck with a flamethrower ambushed him out of nowhere, screaming like a lunatic and trying to light him on fire. He managed to get his pistol out and fire off a frantic, sloppy shot that fucking missed, but he managed to scare the crazy off. He just made a mental note of the location so that he could pass the knowledge to other couriers to avoid the area.

Warning: lunatic with a flamethrower and trigger-happy finger.

He ran out of RadAway for a while, and had the misfortune to run into a glowing one, leading to a couple days of retching up anything he tried to put in his stomach until he paid a traveling merchant an exorbitant sum for RadAway so he could manage to eat and drink.

He’s still a few days from New Vegas with the letters he picked up from one of the hamlets, and he understandably won’t get paid if he’s dead. Quite frankly, dying would also be an unfortunate side effect. An impeccable aim, big gun, and a sharp knife won’t save him from heat stroke, starvation, and dehydration, as much as he wish it would.

Not that getting paid will really set him up for any kind of wealth, since the most likely outcome will be every cap being spent on supplies and equipment to support his “promising career” as a courier despite “squandering” his talent by making runs to the tiny hamlets instead of working for the big money clients.

Regardless, this payment will go to new shoes since his are nearly worn through, restocking his RadAway supply, getting more ammo, and fucking food and water. In that order, if he’s being completely honest. Sissy couriers might balk at eating the interesting flora and fauna in the Waste, but with a good stock of RadAway, you can eat pretty much anything. As long as you know what not to eat.

His foot catches on a dip in the highway, but he mercifully manages to catch himself with his palm. The coarse grit of the crumbling pavement cuts into his hand, opening tiny, stinging cuts. His ankle throbs with every step, but he doesn’t have the energy to care. Not for the first time in his life or in the past few days, he wonders if it’s time to lie down and let himself cook in the sun.

The most dangerous thing in the Mojave isn’t necessarily the heat or the dry hair that leeches every drop of moisture from your skin and body. It’s having a source of pure water, radiation-free and reliable.

Years ago, when he was about seventeen, he came home from a short job, one of his first jobs, to a smoking ruin that was once his family’s house. His jobs back then hadn’t taken more than day, but after that, there was nothing keeping him from taking the long jobs. It didn’t matter anymore.

All that he could do was start again.

They call him one of the most talented couriers in the business these days. He gets messages delivered fast, he doesn’t die, he’s reliable, and he doesn’t take long breaks to spend time with family.

He’s built a reputation, a name for himself. Even the little hamlets out in the ass end of nowhere know his, and it’s a good thing no else in the world has a fucking name like Andross, otherwise knowing his name wouldn’t mean shit.

He heaves a sigh, adjusting the strap of his heavy sniper rifle on his should and checking the safety of his revolver shoved in his waistband. He pushes his hair back, the soaked strands slicking to his scalp.

He hasn’t had to piss all day, which he distantly acknowledges as a bad sign. The dehydration’s reaching a critical point, and at this rate he’ll have to suffer some radiation from drinking contaminated water. If he didn’t have letters in his bag, half of them penned by his own hand for the folk who couldn’t read or write, he’d probably go ahead and lay down to die.

He was told once that his family kicking it was the best thing to happen to him. Something about holding back his potential as a courier or something. The parents that put the jagged scar (the glass shatters against his temple—his eyelid closes just in time to keep a shard out of his eye, if not for fear it’d be blinded) burning in hell, or something to that effect.

They don’t ever talk about his sisters locked in the closet under the stairs. He wonders if that was how the war was, back in 2077.

To be fair, the guy was probably right, but he walked away with a broken nose anyway. Andross almost didn’t walk away, but he tries to give as good as he gets.

He stumbles a second time, this time embarrassingly over his own feet. He rebalances, licking his cracked lips and looking out around him. He searches for a landmark to give him a clue as to where to find shelter. Couriers all have their own personal landmarks to indicate where they are, sometimes a weird looking rock, sometimes an abandoned pre-war structure.

He squints at a Joshua tree, trying to sort through his mental catalog of his landmarks. His thoughts move sluggishly as he slowly examines the tree. Belatedly, his eyes alight on a curve in the tree reminiscent of an ass. He’s a couple hours south of a small town he’s well-known enough in.

Guess he isn’t dying today.

He goes into some sort of autopilot for an hour or maybe more when he’s suddenly jolted into awareness by the sound of human voices to his left. Taking a bracing breath, he kneels down to avoid attention, drawing the strap over his head. Looking through the scope, he recognizes a symbol drawn on their coats as a particularly vicious band of outlaws.

He checks on his ammo situation—two bullets already loaded, ten in his bag. Two bullets, two targets, hopefully. He flicks off the safety and braces against the recoil, lining up the shot. He takes the first one in the forehead, grunting at the force of the recoil, his water and food deprived muscles screaming. He recocks the gun, and takes the second in the throat. Sloppy.

The second recoil almost knocks him flat, the world spinning for a brief few seconds. He reaches into his bag for three bullets to load into the gun. He slings the gun over his shoulder, and roughly lurches to his feet, nearly overbalancing as the world spins again and his stomach turning uncomfortably.

He begins to take unsteady steps forward, always forward. He starts again.

Andross always starts again.

**Author's Note:**

> A gift to Gigi for her birthday like a year ago, and since Fallout 4 was just released, I feel like it's time to go ahead and upload it.


End file.
